D18: 保亭 → 陵水

February 4, 2025

Ever since last year's trip to Dublin¹, I've been paying extra attention to painted utility boxes. This one is a trompe l'oeil vending machine

Even though most of yesterday wasn't spent biking, I shall—for the purposes of "not crossing my path²"—treat my arrival in Baoting as if I arrived by bike, which means that, in leaving, I have to take a completely different route than the former provincial highway³ that's been the G361 for the past 8 or 10 years.

My preference is always for taking the small and obscure routes with worse grading and pavement standards, so this is hardly an imposition.

With the help of intermediate points that I'm probably not going to stop and visit, such as the wild hot springs at Nanping Bridge⁴, I work out a fairly reasonable route which (surprising as this may be) I mostly stuck to.

Li Brocade Dragon Quilt design painted on an older apartment building

I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever noticed the Basic Farmland Protection Sign being a photograph

My room at the Supply and Marketing Collective Hotel, while extremely nice on the price to quality ratio for the southern third of the island at this time of year wasn't really the kind of place you want to hang out over breakfast and, as I still had a Luckin voucher, I decided to caffeinate there.

Its possible that the extreme frustration I had with the app for forcing me to slowly scroll through the whole menu to try and find which coffees (nine in total) were included in the voucher was based on my not yet having had coffer. It also could have been one of those intentional micro-aggressions so loved by Big Data companies that are trying to learn everything about you so as to better sell you stuff.

Achievement Unlocked, first time (this Tour) staying someplace old enough to have these magnetic proto keycards

Which was okay in terms of remembering that I wanted extra ice and no sweetener in my coffee, but still annoying because all I wanted when clicking on a voucher for "pick one of nine" was for those nine and only those nine to show up. And, instead, I got the whole menu.

Which is how, through no deliberate action on my own (but almost certainly very deliberate action on the part of Luckin) I got a citrus based coffee drink that mostly "wasn't terrible" because my current standard in "terrible coffee" is a poorly pulled over-extracted shot of slightly stale super dark roast coffee poured over a lukewarm slurry of sweet potato and water.

For anyone who remembers the not too distant past of "China is an empire pretending to be a country⁵," the fact that this pharmacy takes social insurance cards from this many provinces is really, really cool

The flavors balanced well enough, but the orange flavored beverage over ice which the coffee was poured into was closer to American Sunny-D or British cordial than it was orange juice and it was really rather weird. All in all, in terms of gimmicky drinks, I definitely prefer the previous Luckin excursion's pistachio latte.

Caffeinated and hydrated, my first stop of the day is a village where, when the name was transliterated from the Li language⁶, ended up coming across as something which—in Mandarin—appears to be "East Whatever." Then, I'm off for real on a section of road which takes all of about two turns and two kilometers to drop me from the middle of cityland to the middle of rural.

I think I may have mentioned previously that Baoting is one of those counties that, quite rudely, does not participate in the Bridge Game⁷, so I have no way of tallying my score when crossing any of many bridges of varying sizes and degrees of quality and maintenance. I tell myself I don't actually care, but I've been challenging myself to try to guess correctly for so long now that I find that I really do care⁸.

The scenery around me is all kinds of tropical prettiness. The sun has come out but isn't burning hot the way it was my day at the resort. There's a slightly nippy breeze that isn't a headwind. The people I stop and talk to insist on giving me things (like a bottle of the pickles they are making or a freshly harvested coconut). The kid on a bike who tries to beat me up her local crazy steep hill, can't.

Covid test booth that's been upcycled into a community first aid cabinet

It's just generally a pretty, fucking awesome day.

I had been planning on going all the way to Nanqiao on the other side of the only mountain on the classic east routes which the majority of the bike tourers take south from Haikou to Sanya, but, by the time I've merged with the G223, there is way too little sunlight left to me, and the pimple dots which show up on the map when I search for lodging either don't have phone numbers, don't answer their phones, or are absurd prices⁹ for their location.

As a result, I turn south towards downtown Lingshui. I'll figure out a torturous and almost certainly stunning countryside route out of Lingshui that will allow me to avoid backtracking over today's path when I leave tomorrow, but the sudden discovery of a newly erected historical site marker for a building from 1914 which I don't have time to go exploring now (and which, on the morrow, appears to not exist at this location) ensures that I will be backtracking.

The hotel that I've chosen using the "top third of the bottom tier" method has never had a foreigner before and isn't super keen on the idea of letting me behind the front desk, but someone has told them about the Haiyiban applet's Foreign Hotel Guest Registration capabilities and—although it will necessitate a follow up visit to my room and a total unnecessary apology from them—I probably¹⁰ get registered on that.

His home village is close enough to the classic routes that the cycletourists take that he thought to get panniers and ride home, but he's also quite emphatically Not a Tourist and doesn't understand why I want to talk to him

¹ China has been doing the painted utility boxes for a number of years, but they usually aren't high art. Dublin City Council has raised it to the level of having artists submit designs when competing for the right to paint the boxes, and nearly every box has links to the artist's social media

² Circumstances with potential sleeping points that, come morning, force me to retrace the previous night's route are the only time this is acceptable and they aren't very acceptable

³ "Highway" in the non-expressway sense of the word. In addition to different minimum construction standards for new roads and how near to the road buildings or crops can be, I suspect that the national, provincial, county, village (G, S, X, Y) designations that end up on most numbered routes have something to do with who is funding those roads, but I don't know for certain.

Future site of the headquarters of the Hunan Provincial Southern Seed Breeding and Multiplication Base¹²

⁴ Which I was pretty disappointed with in 2019 and which I understand have only gotten more disappointing now that they are famous online

⁵ Not only in the sense that I used to be charged money to make a withdrawal from my Bank of China Haikou account while in another province, but that China Post Hainan wouldn't accept "nonstandard" mailers sold by China Post Shanghai

⁶ They kind of sort of don't have a written language, but that's because the written language they had was like every other Asian language in that it mostly used a modified corpus of Chinese characters.

Cycling infrastructure built by non cyclists

This statue makes me think something Important and Communist happened here

⁷ Using only the shape and form of the bridge, any decorations on the bridge, and the level of wear, how accurately can I guess the age prior to checking an info sign

⁸ If only because of the number of surviving 1958 and 1959 bridges on the national road near Sanya have provided a new puzzle piece in the story of the island's history.

⁹ I'm willing to pay 150 or 200 a night for a room, if the room quality is worth that much. If I can get the exact same quality room for 80 by going five or ten flat kilometers in the other direction, however ...

Best thing about riding with a GPS is knowing that roads like this will connect

Not that there's anything bad about roads like this

¹⁰ So far, every registration this trip using Haiyiban has either come back the next day with a "your registration failed" message or has never gotten any response at all.

¹¹ Lingshui County was an especially active participant in the Campaign to Internationalize Hainan's Public Facing Signage. None of it is accurately translated.

¹² If you call it "Nanfan" in English, I will bite your head off

Today's ride: 68 km (42 miles)
Total: 1,229 km (763 miles)

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